Bush's goal to slash federal deficit may be elusive

WASHINGTON — The large tables in President Bush's new budget show he intends to keep his promise of slicing the federal deficit in half by the end of his term, but the fine print indicates that the goal may be elusive.

The budget is notable for including limits on spending that are unlikely to be enacted and for excluding expenses that are sure to be incurred. Here are the most important points:

• It assumes that all discretionary spending outside of defense and homeland security — everything from paper clips to space shuttles — will be frozen for the next five years.

• It includes no spending for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2006. Those costs are now running at about $5 billion a month and are likely to continue at some level in fiscal year 2006 and beyond.

• It omits the initial cost of Bush's Social Security plan, which would let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private saving accounts. Administration officials estimate the plan would cost $774 billion over the next decade.

• It leaves out the cost of reining in the Alternative Minimum Tax, a parallel tax that was created to catch the nation's wealthiest taxpayers but is now ensnaring millions of moderate-income families as incomes rise with inflation.

"It's a very unrealistic budget for a document that is supposed to reflect the president's policies," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan organization that lobbies for deficit reduction.

In his message to Congress, Bush promised to hold "federal programs to a firm test of accountability" and take "the steps necessary to achieve our deficit reduction goals."

The budget envisions the annual deficit shrinking from $427 billion to $233 billion by 2009. As a share of the national economy, a measure economists consider more meaningful, the deficit would decline from 3.6 percent to 1.5 percent, meeting the president's goal of cutting the deficit in half.

But even with all the expensive omissions and problematic spending cuts, many of which Congress rejected last year, Bush's goal of deficit reduction has already slipped further into the future.

One year ago, when he first pledged to cut the deficit in half by fiscal year 2009, the White House predicted that the budget deficit would decline to $364 billion in 2005 and $268 billion in 2006.